Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Herman Melville’s masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Over a century and a half after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Never losing its cultural prescence, Melville’s nautical epic has inspired many films over the years, including the film adaptation of Nathanael Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea, starring Chris Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Ben Wishaw, and Brendan Gleeson, and directed by Ron Howard. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception. This Penguin Classics edition, featuring an introduction by Andrew Delbanco and notes by Tom Quirk, prints the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Melville's text, approved by the Center for Scholarly Editions and the Center for Editions of American Authors of the MLA. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

"A great meter is no mere implement, like pen or typewriter, but a keyboard a young poet learns to master, exploring its range and subtleties, stretching its capabilities of harmony and expressiveness. Merely to accept the meter as given by one's predecessors, to write one's verses “in” iambic pentameter, is to assist at the death of a metrical form and perhaps one's own poetry. The demise of iambic pentameter as the chief meter of English poetry probably owes much to its coming to be understood even by poets themselves as an available prosodic form, a meter to write poems “in,” a Roman road, rather than as a kind of heroic adventure or even a haunted house."[1]

Melville's Moby-Dick: or, the Whale is like the “Roman road” for the English novel. It's wildly inventive, riotously funny, excellently written, has an almost mystical sense of atmosphere, introduces one of the most transcendentally fascinating characters in the whole of world literature in Captain Ahab. And above all, it's simply a great joy to read.2

The greatest novels in the English language are not only excellent narratives; they enrich the language and show its beauty. They're exhilarating, they energize, they inspire. Melville's Moby-Dick certainly fits the bill, and only McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) has recently come close to replicating said grandeur of reading, and in many ways I believe it's a worthy companion to this book. They go hand in hand, and for this reason I invoked Wright's quotation. Melville is so all-encompassing here it's difficult not to think of Moby-Dick as an emblem of creative writing. I think Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is the logical continuation of the inherent complexity of Melville's thought, something we might call modernism. In Moby-Dick there's a sermon, essayistic, encyclopedic descriptions of whaling, sudden leaps into play acting, multiple points of view in narration, soliloquies. And the feeling one has is that all of this belongs there and without which it wouldn't be Moby-Dick. That's a sign of a great novel: that there's no superfluity, everything belongs, every particular creates the essentials.[3]

And then there's Captain Ahab. “He's full of riddles”, says Stubb after being told off by the Captain, and that's exactly what so fascinates in him. Cormac McCarthy definitely modeled Judge Holden after Ahab, so alike are the two with their diabolical and mystical aura. They're mere men but still beyond the narrative. His grandness is Shakespearean[4] It's boisterous, energetic, mesmerizing.

The Penguin that I own is quite nice, it has a good introduction and some supplements at the back: a list of variants between editions, annotations as well as maps and images. The annotations at their very best give insight into Melville's writing that becomes essential in reading the novel. Such is the gloss on Ahab's “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”: “Melville remarked in a letter to Hawthorne (June 29, 1851) that this is the secret ‘motto' of the book.”

I have also listened to an audiobook version of the book, narrated by Frank Muller. It's one of the best audiobooks I've heard. He reads it a bit fast at times, but it's his rhythm and the voices he produces that make it so utterly enjoyable.

Endnotes:

[1] George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, 18.

[2] I know there are people who would rathe jump out of the window than read it, so there.

[3] Again I hear somebody trying to jump out the window.

[4] “I'd strike the sun if it insulted me” in chapter 36; “What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer” in chapter 37.

2 October, 2011

I am surprised to say I will likely read this again.

This book. I'm not quite sure what to say. I started this book out thinking this was going to be fun. After 140 pages or so, I was glad I found a very well done audiobook (solo recorded) on librivox.org –> Moby Dick read by Stewart Wills

There were quite a few beautiful passages. Perhaps my favourite ones were Chapter 94 - A Squeeze of the hand and the ones about the anatomy of the Sperm and Right Whale. Throughout the book I've been interested by the large mammals and sea life in general. It has inspired me to look up a multitude of stuff.

For the rest of it though. It is dense, terse and does not move along at all. The story is hardly the most interesting part of the book, but it's what keeps coming back. It sometimes feels as if Melville was really trying to show everyone how much he really knows about stuff.

I'm not sure I will ever muster up the courage to reread this ever again.